So this is the story of how Donald Trump tried to use misdirection at his State of the Union address to take the spotlight off his Neonazi tendencies, which underlie his hatred of African-Americans (against whom he was found to discriminate as a landlord), of Mexicans, of Muslims, and other peoples not coded as “white” in his warped little brain. Trump tried to appropriate the fight against the supremacist who killed Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, but the effort came across as calculating and staged.

Trump cares so little for minority rights that he actually said “Islam hates us” and urged a ban on all Muslim immigration to the US.

Cambridge Analytica, the data mining firm founded by billionaire and part-time neo-fascist Robert Mercer, illicitly used 50 million voter profiles from Facebook on Trump’s behalf. Cambridge Analytica also met with the Russians. Mercer was also behind building up the white supremacist rag Breitbart, and appears, despite denials, to have been close to Steve Bannon, who was a vice president at Cambridge Analytica and the editor of Breitbart. Bannon, for a while White House chief strategist, has recently been in Europe urging French fascists to own their racism and boast of it, and praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose troops killed 300,000 American and British soldiers. That is what Trumpism, which Bannon championed, stands for.

Embed from Getty ImagesThe Movement For A Europe Of Nations And Freedom (MENL EUROPA) Holds A Meeting In Brussels. BRUSSEL, BELGIUM – DECEMBER 08: Former White House Chief Stratgist and Senior Counselor to President Donald Trump and CEO of the Trump Presidential Campaign, Steve Bannon speaks with journalists and delivers a speech during a conference of the Marrakesh-pact organised by Flemish far-right party Vlaams Belang at the Flemish Parliament on December 08, 2018 in Brussel, Belgium. (Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images).

Trump appointed Bannon to run his campaign after Paul Manafort was forced out over rumors that he took $12.7 in off-the-books money to lobby for pro-Russian Ukrainian pooh-bah Viktor Yanukovych, and Trump then made Bannon his chief White House strategist.

This point must be underlined. Bannon was Breitbart. He was supremacism. He was a Boston Irish Catholic reworking of whiteness to include northern European Catholics but to exclude Latin American ones. It was the ultimate revenge for white people having viewed the Irish who immigrated in the 19th century as “black.”

Bannon praises Benito Mussolini, who is not as widely vilified in today’s America as he should be. His armies slaughtered 330,000 Allied troops during World War II, including large numbers of Americans. Of 45,000 Italian Jews, 8,000 were delivered to Nazi death camps and a similar number were forced to flee abroad. Some $1 billion was stolen from them as a community.

I mean, Ezra Pound, the great poet who went insane in his old age, haunted by his paranoia about Jewish banking conspiracies, and did radio broadcasts for Mussolini– Ezra Pound was consigned to an insane asylum for holding views that have a family resemblance to Bannon’s own. In contrast, Bannon is running around free in the wild.

And Trump made Bannon his chief strategist in the White House.

George C. Patton has turned in his grave so much he is digging a tunnel straight through to China.

Then in August of 2017, Neonazis showed up in the small college town of Charlottesville, Va., to intimidate that community with thuggish violence over their determination to take down a Confederate statue to a slaver. The Neonazis and various other horrid creatures had been emboldened by Trump’s embrace of Bannon and Breitbart, of a New New Right wherein pampered and effete white suburbanites were finally allowed to play out their fantasies of racial superiority and to engage in berserker rage against the minorities who were keeping them down.

Embed from Getty ImagesAlt Right, Neo Nazis hold torch rally at UVA. Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017 (Photo by Shay Horse/NurPhoto via Getty Images).

One of the targets of the Neonazis was the synagogue in Charlottesville. They chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

This is a reference to their insane conspiracy theory that globalism is a plot of Jewish bankers who are making money by sending the jobs of the white working class to China and elsewhere, replacing American workers with Chinese or Mexican ones.

The Neonazi thugs terrorized the whole town of Charlottesville, killing one counter-protester and beating others viciously. Less reported was the deliberate scare they tried to throw into Charlottesville Jews:

And when Trump was asked about the Neonazi riot, he said that among the marchers were “very fine people.”

Then at last night’s State of the Union address Trump tried to coopt the murder of 7 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the whole Holocaust for his political purposes.

But guess what. In an opinion poll, 72% of Jewish respondents said they hold that Trump is at least somewhat responsible for the synagogue massacre.

Trump’s assiduous attempts to get the Nazi vote by making endless racist slurs did not pass unnoticed among the various American minorities, including Jews.

Trump isn’t giving people orders to commit violence. But fringe violent racists clearly are taking encouragement from Trump’s outrageous bigotry. White supremacists who bombed a mosque in Minnesota had also volunteered to help build Trump’s wall. Trump delights in his MAGA crowds and his arch one-liners and in whipping people up.

His SOTU spectacle cannot cover up that he helped galvanize those Nazis who invaded Charlottesville.